Political and Historical Traditions Absolute Centralized Rule
Russia has a long history of absolute monarchy and authoritarianism. From the time of the first tsars Russia has been a land united by the fear of the absolute ruler. The Time of Troubles, from 1598 to 1613 was one of the first major enlargements of absolute rule. During the period and directly after, "rigid centralization" (Sommerville) was imposed in response to the turmoil of the time. Later rulers such as Peter the Great further tightened the fist of regal authority; Peter even went so far as to have his own son killed for disagreeing with him (Hewsen). Absolute tsarist rule continued until the Russian Revolution in 1918, but the resulting communist state was no less authoritarian. The reign of Joseph Stalin was especially cruel and vicious. He imposed his five year plans upon the USSR with the hopes of centralizing and revolutionizing Soviet industry, but the plans failed and many starved from famine (Meyer). All dissenters were rounded up by the secret police and thrown in the Gulag. For a brief moment at the end of the Cold War it appeared that leaders like Boris Yeltsin would lead Russia to a democratic future, but after Vladimir Putin came to power it was obvious these beliefs were premature. Since taking power Putin has curbed many Russian freedoms especially those relating to freedom of the press. Russia's long history of centralized authoritarianism is important to understanding Russia's current situation because it sheds light on a potential reason for why Russians are willing to accept Putin's tyranny. Simply put, they have never known any other form of government. (MC)
A Soviet military parade provides a prime opportunity to view people's fear of the absolute ruler and the grandiose display of power needed to inspire said fear
Peter I, Czar of Russia, was one of the most respected and feared absolute rulers in Russian History
Extensive Cultural Heterogeneity
Although Russia was once a small isolated inland culture, the country has become globalized. Over the years Russia has been invaded by the Vikings, Poles, Mongols, French, and Germans (Waldman). By changing the Russian borders, displacing residents, and intermarrying with the native Russians each invading army has changed the demographic composition of Russia. These invasions along with Russia's own expansions across Siberia and into eastern Europe have left a multitude of ethnically diverse people all within the borders of the Russian Federation (Waldman). The Russian Federation with its "republics" and "autonomous regions" is divided based on ethnicity, but the intermixing of peoples throughout Russia has made it impossible for any one region to be ethnically homogeneous. To some degree ethnic heterogeneity has been a destabilizing force for Russia in recent history. The breakup of the USSR was followed by the breaking off of several ethnically different regions like Ukraine and Belarus from the Russian Federation, but other ethnic problem areas like Chechnya are still part of Russia and threaten to disrupt Russian security. (MC)
In Russia people come in all varieties including the blonde-haired, blue-eyed eastern Europeans,...
the Asiatic residents of Siberia,...
the Muslim Chechens, and so many others.
Slavophile Traditions
Russians had a very strong nationalist pride in their customs, language, religion, and history, making them opposed to Western European influences in Russia. Generally speaking, the slavophiles wanted to unify all Slavic people under a single tsar and free the Slavs in the Balkans from the grips of the Ottoman Empire. Although the term Slavic implies an ethnic distinction, most slavophiles would agree that Russian Orthodox would be the true definition of Slavic.
SOVIET TURMOIL; Writers at the Barricades: A Vigil by Slavophiles
By BILL KELLER, New York Times
Published: August 31, 1991
MOSCOW, Aug. 30— The Moscow police tried today to shut down the Russian Writers Union, a bastion of ardent patriots, in the latest wave of recriminations from the failed coup last week.
Leaders of the union refused to leave the building and gathered more than 100 writers for an overnight vigil, asserting that the country's ascending anti-Communists had mounted their own campaign of political repression.
The police move was instigated by liberal writers who accused the union of lending moral support to the hard-liners who tried to wrest the country from President Mikhail S. Gorbachev.
The poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko, who signed a letter to city officials urging that the union building be sealed and its funds frozen, said today that the group's leaders included 'Judases," whose calls for discipline had amounted to an endorsement of the coup. Justice and Revenge
"We don't want to persecute anybody and we must be careful not to cross over the line to revenge," he said. "But after such a putsch, we must not leave some people morally unpunished."
Union leaders denied any role in the attempted coup and said their rivals had undertaken a cultural purge in the coup's aftermath. They barricaded the entrance to the crumbling, yellow building and vowed to stay until evicted by force.
"We are soldiers of conscience," said Yuri Bondarev, a novelist and Russian nationalist. "We are soldiers of honesty. We are soldiers of literature."
The sortie against the writers was the latest in developments that have prompted officials to warn against a "witch hunt" as the Communist Party and agencies undergo shake-ups after the coup.
Vadim V. Bakatin, a reformist named to clean house at the K.G.B., pleaded today against a public airing of K.G.B. files that could provoke vengeance against citizens who cooperated with the police agency.
"We cannot throw these people on the mercy of the mob," he said.
Although politicians have generally argued against a wholesale naming of agents and informers, some have called for selective opening of the files. One member of Parliament, Konstantin Lyubenchenko, said he was pressing for disclosure of legislators who had cooperated with the K.G.B.
Mr. Lyubenchenko said he hoped to expose legislators with K.G.B. ties before next week's Congress of People's Deputies, to undermine the credibility of hard-liners and prevent "another putsch, by constitutional means."
Another accusation of high-handedness by self-styled democrats came today from Valentin M. Falin, head of the Communist Party's international department and a member of Parliament, who said the Russian prosecutor's office searched his apartment and country home for coup-related evidence. He has not been accused of complicity and has legislative immunity.
"A group of five people demanded that my wife immediately open the door, rejected her request to call me before the beginning of this procedure, and said that if she did not open the door voluntarily, it would be broken or blown up," Mr. Falin told Parliament, his voice trembling with indignation.
The legislature's presiding officer, Ivan Laptev, said other members' homes had been searched as the prosecutor's office casts its net widely in search of collaborators.
The attempt to seize the Russian union was the latest turn in a long dispute that has split novelists, playwrights and poets into opposing camps of Slavophile hard-liners and Western-oriented liberals.
The Russian union, which broke off from the Soviet Writers Union last year, is dominated by members who contend that the country has slid into permissiveness, commercialism and lax discipline. Many members have been accused of chauvinism and anti-Semitism in their pursuit of Slavic tradition.
In July Mr. Bondarev, another prominent union member, Valentin Rasputin, and Aleksandr A. Prokhanov, editor of a right-wing newspaper called Dyen (Day), signed an open letter calling for the restoration of order and respect for the military. Among the other co-signers were three of the military and industrial hard-liners who emerged as principals in the coup.
Late this afternoon, Mr. Prokhanov said, about 15 uniformed policemen from a newly organized Moscow "national guard" arrived with orders to evacuate union headquarters and to seal it. They retreated after the Soviet police were called, but vowed to return.
Mr. Prokhanov has come under fire in the liberal press for a television interview taped during the coup, in which he applauded the introduction of troops into Moscow as a way of helping to prevent anarchy and bloodshed.
Tonight, he said his remarks, which were not broadcast until after the coup, had been taken out of context.
Boris S. Romanov, first secretary of the Russian Writers Union, said of Mr. Prokhanov's remarks: "I wouldn't say it was directly in support of the putsch. Prokhanov spoke out with his usual ideas: the establishment of order, defending the integrity of the state, a strong army, patriotism."
Mr. Yevtushenko said that after the coup collapsed, he and several other liberal members of the Soviet Writers Union wrote to the Moscow City Council, accusing the nationalists of "morally criminal behavior."
"We wanted just to stop their activities, freeze their accounts, which could invest in any dubious adventure," he said. "We want them to resign as leaders of the Russian Writers Union. They cannot represent Russian literature after they failed to defend Russian people."
"It's not any kind of witch hunt, as Gorbachev says, but we don't want the witches to hunt people," Mr. Yevtushenko added.
A version of this article appeared in print on August 31, 1991, on page 14 of the New York edition.
An article in the New York Times showing the conflict between traditional Slavophiles and modern WesternizersTraditional Costumes of Russia
Westernization
Although Russia was very proud of its culture and traditions, Tsar Peter the Great in the late 1600s and early 1700s made great efforts to westernize Russia by building a stronger army, a navy, strengthening infrastructure, reorganizing the bureaucracy, and building St. Petersburg, known as the "Window on the West". After his death, Catherine the Great took up the same task and succeeded in making Russia known in the Western world as a major empire. Under Catherine, Russia won some of the heaviest battles against the Ottoman Empire and extended her lands to the Baltic Sea. She pioneered Russia as an international arbiter in the Western world and attempted to open trade with Japan.
Opinion: Modernize Russia? No thanks, says Russian government party
By Paul Wallis, DigitalJournal.com
February 4, 2010
Russian politics, like the history of the country, varies between the insane and the brilliant. The ghosts of Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great, Lenin and Tolstoy can usually be heard muttering in Russian news. Now they’re yelling at each other. A liberal policy group, the Institute of Contemporary Development, has produced a paper which has generated a screaming match in Russian Parliament. The Institute is an adviser for Russian president Medvedev, who’s a trustee on the Institute’s board. The problem with being a Russian liberal is that the country historically tends to go in every other direction but liberalism. If you’re currently under the impression that liberalism isn’t top of the agenda in modern Russia, you’re quite right. The Institute is however doing something which is very Russian: Proposing liberal ideas in the teeth of absolute, total opposition. The battle of Stalingrad was fought along much the same lines until the Russian counterattack. Even Chuikov, the commander of the Stalingrad defenders, lived in a hole in the Volga riverbank with severe eczema and regular shelling, and was informed that relief would be coming when it came. Russian liberals aren't necessarily idealists, but usually besieged realists with a different perspective. Historically, it’s debatable whether Russians would rather argue than breathe, but you wouldn’t get too many people betting against that idea. This particular argument could last another two generations, easily. It’s an irony that the Russians, who were subjected to arguably the most idea-free government in human history for 70 years, can treat ideas like solid objects. That's a good example of Russian culture in its more honest state. The Soviet era was an undersized, mediocre intellectual pygmy compared to Russian cultural history. The irony is that few countries on Earth are more sensitized to ideas, despite or possibly because of that era. The Institute is basically dedicated to the modernization of Russia. That idea’s been around since Peter the Great, and it’s always news in Russia when the subject is raised, because everyone can take part in the arguments. Russia shares with America and China a vast history of speculation about the national future and identity. Which is why this paper will go into history as part of Russian folklore. The Institute’s new paper, Twenty First Century Russia: An Image of the Desired Future includes recommendations for Russia joining a revamped NATO, ending censorship, abolishing the state security service and adopting a Western style democracy. This isn’t a fashionable view at the Kremlin, for some reason. This is the point where treating ideas like solid objects comes into play. You’d think the wolf had got Uncle Vanya by the samovar spout and the Red Army Choir was doing medleys of American patriotic tunes. All that’s missing is the Cossacks arriving to save Mother Russia, usually from other Russians. The United Russia party, Putin’s party, is not pleased. Starting with a comment about returning to Yeltsin’s Russia of the 90s, the United Russia party went so far as to state that the Institute was “idealizing” that period. It’s a matter of opinion how many Russians want to return to the 1990s, but my guess would be that the survivors would prefer not to stage an encore anytime soon. The Institute has hit just about every raw nerve available for the government. Russia’s GDP dropped by about 1500 billion rubles thanks to the recession. It was a nasty hit for a nation just starting to get back on its feet, and it’s naturally shown up every aspect creaks and cracks of economic management. That, inevitably, has hit the government, which is now defending its budget against anything and anyone, and regardless of whether it needs to do so. The Just Russia party, the opposition, received a salvo of invective for opposing the budget. The general view is that this is good healthy debate by Russian standards, a loosening up of the tight and sometimes murderous silences which punctuate Russian politics. If you’ve read The Gulag Archipelago, you’ll remember that the theory of Russian life works mainly on the idea of surviving Russian politics rather than understanding it. Modernization is part of the obvious mix of evolutionary forces which will shape Russia and Russian politics of the future. The trick, historically, is not to be in the way of whichever bulldozer does the actual evolution. The rapid revival of Russia’s military capacity and return to advanced technology is a pretty good indicator of what “modernization” will mean economically, whoever’s doing what. From hideous rust factory to new fighters and warships didn’t take long, and nor did the transition from failed superpower to renascent superpower. Modernization will happen, but you could make a fortune in side bets on how and when it’ll happen. Russian history is never dull. All you have to do is live through it. Expect the impossible, rather than the obvious.
Although Russia has been working towards "modernization" since the times of Peter the Great, there is still great opposition to the concept and/or what it entails.
St. Petersburg, known as the "Window on the West"
Revolutions of the 20th Century
Russia's absolute, centralized rule ended in 1917 when the Bolsheviks, led by Vladimir Lenin, seized power of Russia and executed Tsar Nicholas II and his family. The Bolsheviks renamed Russia the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, and created a socialist government headed by communist leaders. They tried to combine westernization with slavophiles, working towards industrialization and technological development while maintaining a resistance to Western culture and customs.
In 1991, the USSR's fifteen republics under Mikhail Gorbachev became fifteen independent nations. The Russian Federation was taken over by Boris Yeltsin who worked quickly to restructure the newly founded Federation. The two major goals of Yeltsin's early programs were to restructure the administrative command system and create a market-based economy.
Putin's "Power Vertical" Doesn't Leave Other Ties to Keep Russia Together
Publication: Eurasia Daily Monitor
Volume: 6 Issue: 37
February 25, 2009 02:28 PM
Age: 352 days
Category: Eurasia Daily Monitor, Russia, Domestic/Social, Home Page
By: Yuri Zarakhovich
"As a scholar, I establish the fact that the Russian Federation is developing signs of the initial stage of a breakup," Professor Alexei Malashenko, Scholar-in-Residence of the Carnegie Moscow Center, told Jamestown on February 12. "Not unlike the case of the USSR, the current economic crisis threatens to bring already badly strained internal ties to the breaking point."
The first parts to break away, Malashenko believes, will be the Kaliningrad enclave, wedged between Poland, Lithuania, and Belarus and firmly oriented to Europe, and the Far East on the opposite side of this country, firmly locked economically to China, Japan, and South Korea.
The Kaliningrad region and the Far East have as little in common within the Russian Federation as, say, Estonia and Turkmenistan did in the Soviet Union. No viable economic ties exist between the extremes of this large country. There is nothing like Route 1 from Key West, Florida, to Fort Kent on the Canadian border to link Kaliningrad to Vladivostok. Only centralized control, known as Putin's vertical of power, has kept Russian regions together like hoops on a cask. As the systemic crisis loosens the hoops, however, the decayed cask will start falling apart.
On February 9 the Republic of Tuva, which borders Mongolia in Eastern Siberia (and of whose existence most Muscovites are only dimly aware), challenged a key element of this power vertical. Under Putin, regional legislatures just rubber-stamp Moscow's "recommended" presidents and governors (just as Soviet Communist party regional committees "elected" Moscow's "recommended" first secretaries). The central government appoints the key officials of federal agencies in the regions, regardless of local feelings. Tuva now wants Moscow to seek regional approval for such appointments.
Although the legislation initiated by Tuva will most likely die on the Duma floor, it does reflect the longstanding anger that has been smoldering in the regions as Putin has been turning the Russian Federation into a unitary state. This anger just broke out in a dangerous way in Dagestan. On February 2 Moscow appointed Vladimir Radchenko to head the Dagestan Republican Directorate of the Federal Internal Revenue Service (UFNS).
On February 3 Radchenko could not enter Dagestan, because a large crowd of protesting Lezgins, Dagestan's third-largest ethnic group, would not let him in. The Lezgins have a claim on the UFNS under an informal delineation of powers in the multi-ethnic republic.
Only on February 6 was Radchenko able to make his way into the UFNS headquarters in Makhachkala. He did not stay long, however. Two gunmen broke in, threatened him with guns, grabbed him, and threw him into a car. The kidnappers told Radchenko that they would kill him if he did not leave Dagestan and then just dumped him in the downtown area. Radchenko left the republic.
Radchenko's lawyer, Murad Karikhmanov, quoted his client as saying that it was his UFNS deputy Gadzhimurat Aliev, a son of Dagestan President Mukhu Aliev, who led the opposition to block Moscow's appointee from assuming office. Moscow had to swallow this bitter pill to avoid provoking more confrontations in restive Dagestan.
Meanwhile, on February 11 the Moscow-based daily Moskovskiy Komsomolets (MK) published a story titled "Diamond Luster: Who Is Tearing Sakha out of Russia?" The Republic of Sakha-Yakutia has 90 percent of all of Russia's diamonds and 30 percent of its natural gas reserves, oil, as well as other riches. The MK story cites numerous stories "regularly appearing on popular Yakutian [Internet] sites and calling almost directly for secession from Russia." MK frets that "American sites pick up these stories." MK accuses Afanasi Maksimov, a local millionaire-entrepreneur and a deputy of the republican legislature of launching this "Independence for Yakutia" campaign and "fanning up the enmity" toward the central government as a defense against possible criminal prosecution for his numerous misdemeanors. That might well be; but MK also refers to local dissidents who insist that the federal center "beats and humiliates Yakutia."
Increased confrontation in Yakutia is indicative of growing centrifugal tension in Russia, held dormant under Putin's heel since the late 1990s but never resolved politically or economically.
During the economic crisis of the 1990s, Russian regions walled up, either banning exports to neighbors—Krasnodarsky Krai banned selling its grain to other Russian regions-or banning imports from its neighbors—Tatarstan banned vodka imports from other Russian regions. Internal customs houses, banned by Empress Elisabeth in 1754, sprang into being again. On February 3 the Moscow-based Kommersant reported that since January 15, Tatarstan had again banned vodka imports from other Russian regions.
A key factor that could unite a country in crisis is its citizens' right to self-government and self-organization. Putin's power vertical, however, is aimed at nipping any attempts at such self-determination in the bud. On May 20, 2005, then-FSB Director Nikolai Patrushev flatly stated that NGOs working in Russia threatened the country's security. On January 10, 2006, then-President Putin signed a law that severely curtailed NGOs' activities and placed them under stringent state control.
Oleg Panfilov, a noted scholar and human rights activist, told Jamestown on February 13, "With economic ties broken and self-organization traditionally suppressed, the rotten barrel of Putin's state indeed risks falling apart, once the authoritarian hoops strain to the breaking point." This article questions whether the Russian Federation will remain a federation for long, and whether another revolution is about to happen
A political cartoon depicting the October Revolution, showing Trotsky taking over everything.
(MH)
Zarakhovich, Yuri. "Putin's "Power Vertical" Doesn't Leave Other Ties to Keep Russia Together." Eurasia Daily Monitor. 25 Feb 2009: Volume 6, Issue 37. The Jamestown Foundation. 14 Feb 2010. < http://www.jamestown.org/single/?no_cache=1&tx_ttnews% 5Btt_news%5D=34548>.
Absolute Centralized Rule
A Soviet military parade provides a prime opportunity to view people's fear of the absolute ruler and the grandiose display of power needed to inspire said fear
Extensive Cultural Heterogeneity
the Muslim Chechens, and so many others.
Slavophile Traditions
SOVIET TURMOIL; Writers at the Barricades: A Vigil by Slavophiles
By BILL KELLER, New York Times
Published: August 31, 1991
MOSCOW, Aug. 30— The Moscow police tried today to shut down the Russian Writers Union, a bastion of ardent patriots, in the latest wave of recriminations from the failed coup last week.
Leaders of the union refused to leave the building and gathered more than 100 writers for an overnight vigil, asserting that the country's ascending anti-Communists had mounted their own campaign of political repression.
The police move was instigated by liberal writers who accused the union of lending moral support to the hard-liners who tried to wrest the country from President Mikhail S. Gorbachev.
The poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko, who signed a letter to city officials urging that the union building be sealed and its funds frozen, said today that the group's leaders included 'Judases," whose calls for discipline had amounted to an endorsement of the coup. Justice and Revenge
"We don't want to persecute anybody and we must be careful not to cross over the line to revenge," he said. "But after such a putsch, we must not leave some people morally unpunished."
Union leaders denied any role in the attempted coup and said their rivals had undertaken a cultural purge in the coup's aftermath. They barricaded the entrance to the crumbling, yellow building and vowed to stay until evicted by force.
"We are soldiers of conscience," said Yuri Bondarev, a novelist and Russian nationalist. "We are soldiers of honesty. We are soldiers of literature."
The sortie against the writers was the latest in developments that have prompted officials to warn against a "witch hunt" as the Communist Party and agencies undergo shake-ups after the coup.
Vadim V. Bakatin, a reformist named to clean house at the K.G.B., pleaded today against a public airing of K.G.B. files that could provoke vengeance against citizens who cooperated with the police agency.
"We cannot throw these people on the mercy of the mob," he said.
Although politicians have generally argued against a wholesale naming of agents and informers, some have called for selective opening of the files. One member of Parliament, Konstantin Lyubenchenko, said he was pressing for disclosure of legislators who had cooperated with the K.G.B.
Mr. Lyubenchenko said he hoped to expose legislators with K.G.B. ties before next week's Congress of People's Deputies, to undermine the credibility of hard-liners and prevent "another putsch, by constitutional means."
Another accusation of high-handedness by self-styled democrats came today from Valentin M. Falin, head of the Communist Party's international department and a member of Parliament, who said the Russian prosecutor's office searched his apartment and country home for coup-related evidence. He has not been accused of complicity and has legislative immunity.
"A group of five people demanded that my wife immediately open the door, rejected her request to call me before the beginning of this procedure, and said that if she did not open the door voluntarily, it would be broken or blown up," Mr. Falin told Parliament, his voice trembling with indignation.
The legislature's presiding officer, Ivan Laptev, said other members' homes had been searched as the prosecutor's office casts its net widely in search of collaborators.
The attempt to seize the Russian union was the latest turn in a long dispute that has split novelists, playwrights and poets into opposing camps of Slavophile hard-liners and Western-oriented liberals.
The Russian union, which broke off from the Soviet Writers Union last year, is dominated by members who contend that the country has slid into permissiveness, commercialism and lax discipline. Many members have been accused of chauvinism and anti-Semitism in their pursuit of Slavic tradition.
In July Mr. Bondarev, another prominent union member, Valentin Rasputin, and Aleksandr A. Prokhanov, editor of a right-wing newspaper called Dyen (Day), signed an open letter calling for the restoration of order and respect for the military. Among the other co-signers were three of the military and industrial hard-liners who emerged as principals in the coup.
Late this afternoon, Mr. Prokhanov said, about 15 uniformed policemen from a newly organized Moscow "national guard" arrived with orders to evacuate union headquarters and to seal it. They retreated after the Soviet police were called, but vowed to return.
Mr. Prokhanov has come under fire in the liberal press for a television interview taped during the coup, in which he applauded the introduction of troops into Moscow as a way of helping to prevent anarchy and bloodshed.
Tonight, he said his remarks, which were not broadcast until after the coup, had been taken out of context.
Boris S. Romanov, first secretary of the Russian Writers Union, said of Mr. Prokhanov's remarks: "I wouldn't say it was directly in support of the putsch. Prokhanov spoke out with his usual ideas: the establishment of order, defending the integrity of the state, a strong army, patriotism."
Mr. Yevtushenko said that after the coup collapsed, he and several other liberal members of the Soviet Writers Union wrote to the Moscow City Council, accusing the nationalists of "morally criminal behavior."
"We wanted just to stop their activities, freeze their accounts, which could invest in any dubious adventure," he said. "We want them to resign as leaders of the Russian Writers Union. They cannot represent Russian literature after they failed to defend Russian people."
"It's not any kind of witch hunt, as Gorbachev says, but we don't want the witches to hunt people," Mr. Yevtushenko added.
A version of this article appeared in print on August 31, 1991, on page 14 of the New York edition.
An article in the New York Times showing the conflict between traditional Slavophiles and modern Westernizers
Traditional Costumes of Russia
Westernization
Opinion: Modernize Russia? No thanks, says Russian government party
By Paul Wallis, DigitalJournal.comFebruary 4, 2010
Russian politics, like the history of the country, varies between the insane and the brilliant. The ghosts of Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great, Lenin and Tolstoy can usually be heard muttering in Russian news. Now they’re yelling at each other. A liberal policy group, the Institute of Contemporary Development, has produced a paper which has generated a screaming match in Russian Parliament. The Institute is an adviser for Russian president Medvedev, who’s a trustee on the Institute’s board. The problem with being a Russian liberal is that the country historically tends to go in every other direction but liberalism. If you’re currently under the impression that liberalism isn’t top of the agenda in modern Russia, you’re quite right. The Institute is however doing something which is very Russian: Proposing liberal ideas in the teeth of absolute, total opposition. The battle of Stalingrad was fought along much the same lines until the Russian counterattack. Even Chuikov, the commander of the Stalingrad defenders, lived in a hole in the Volga riverbank with severe eczema and regular shelling, and was informed that relief would be coming when it came. Russian liberals aren't necessarily idealists, but usually besieged realists with a different perspective. Historically, it’s debatable whether Russians would rather argue than breathe, but you wouldn’t get too many people betting against that idea. This particular argument could last another two generations, easily. It’s an irony that the Russians, who were subjected to arguably the most idea-free government in human history for 70 years, can treat ideas like solid objects. That's a good example of Russian culture in its more honest state. The Soviet era was an undersized, mediocre intellectual pygmy compared to Russian cultural history. The irony is that few countries on Earth are more sensitized to ideas, despite or possibly because of that era. The Institute is basically dedicated to the modernization of Russia. That idea’s been around since Peter the Great, and it’s always news in Russia when the subject is raised, because everyone can take part in the arguments. Russia shares with America and China a vast history of speculation about the national future and identity. Which is why this paper will go into history as part of Russian folklore. The Institute’s new paper, Twenty First Century Russia: An Image of the Desired Future includes recommendations for Russia joining a revamped NATO, ending censorship, abolishing the state security service and adopting a Western style democracy. This isn’t a fashionable view at the Kremlin, for some reason. This is the point where treating ideas like solid objects comes into play. You’d think the wolf had got Uncle Vanya by the samovar spout and the Red Army Choir was doing medleys of American patriotic tunes. All that’s missing is the Cossacks arriving to save Mother Russia, usually from other Russians. The United Russia party, Putin’s party, is not pleased. Starting with a comment about returning to Yeltsin’s Russia of the 90s, the United Russia party went so far as to state that the Institute was “idealizing” that period. It’s a matter of opinion how many Russians want to return to the 1990s, but my guess would be that the survivors would prefer not to stage an encore anytime soon. The Institute has hit just about every raw nerve available for the government. Russia’s GDP dropped by about 1500 billion rubles thanks to the recession. It was a nasty hit for a nation just starting to get back on its feet, and it’s naturally shown up every aspect creaks and cracks of economic management. That, inevitably, has hit the government, which is now defending its budget against anything and anyone, and regardless of whether it needs to do so. The Just Russia party, the opposition, received a salvo of invective for opposing the budget. The general view is that this is good healthy debate by Russian standards, a loosening up of the tight and sometimes murderous silences which punctuate Russian politics. If you’ve read The Gulag Archipelago, you’ll remember that the theory of Russian life works mainly on the idea of surviving Russian politics rather than understanding it. Modernization is part of the obvious mix of evolutionary forces which will shape Russia and Russian politics of the future. The trick, historically, is not to be in the way of whichever bulldozer does the actual evolution. The rapid revival of Russia’s military capacity and return to advanced technology is a pretty good indicator of what “modernization” will mean economically, whoever’s doing what. From hideous rust factory to new fighters and warships didn’t take long, and nor did the transition from failed superpower to renascent superpower. Modernization will happen, but you could make a fortune in side bets on how and when it’ll happen. Russian history is never dull. All you have to do is live through it. Expect the impossible, rather than the obvious.
Although Russia has been working towards "modernization" since the times of Peter the Great, there is still great opposition to the concept and/or what it entails.
St. Petersburg, known as the "Window on the West"
Revolutions of the 20th Century
Putin's "Power Vertical" Doesn't Leave Other Ties to Keep Russia Together
Publication: Eurasia Daily MonitorVolume: 6 Issue: 37
February 25, 2009 02:28 PM
Age: 352 days
Category: Eurasia Daily Monitor, Russia, Domestic/Social, Home Page
By: Yuri Zarakhovich
"As a scholar, I establish the fact that the Russian Federation is developing signs of the initial stage of a breakup," Professor Alexei Malashenko, Scholar-in-Residence of the Carnegie Moscow Center, told Jamestown on February 12. "Not unlike the case of the USSR, the current economic crisis threatens to bring already badly strained internal ties to the breaking point."
The first parts to break away, Malashenko believes, will be the Kaliningrad enclave, wedged between Poland, Lithuania, and Belarus and firmly oriented to Europe, and the Far East on the opposite side of this country, firmly locked economically to China, Japan, and South Korea.
The Kaliningrad region and the Far East have as little in common within the Russian Federation as, say, Estonia and Turkmenistan did in the Soviet Union. No viable economic ties exist between the extremes of this large country. There is nothing like Route 1 from Key West, Florida, to Fort Kent on the Canadian border to link Kaliningrad to Vladivostok. Only centralized control, known as Putin's vertical of power, has kept Russian regions together like hoops on a cask. As the systemic crisis loosens the hoops, however, the decayed cask will start falling apart.
On February 9 the Republic of Tuva, which borders Mongolia in Eastern Siberia (and of whose existence most Muscovites are only dimly aware), challenged a key element of this power vertical. Under Putin, regional legislatures just rubber-stamp Moscow's "recommended" presidents and governors (just as Soviet Communist party regional committees "elected" Moscow's "recommended" first secretaries). The central government appoints the key officials of federal agencies in the regions, regardless of local feelings. Tuva now wants Moscow to seek regional approval for such appointments.
Although the legislation initiated by Tuva will most likely die on the Duma floor, it does reflect the longstanding anger that has been smoldering in the regions as Putin has been turning the Russian Federation into a unitary state. This anger just broke out in a dangerous way in Dagestan. On February 2 Moscow appointed Vladimir Radchenko to head the Dagestan Republican Directorate of the Federal Internal Revenue Service (UFNS).
On February 3 Radchenko could not enter Dagestan, because a large crowd of protesting Lezgins, Dagestan's third-largest ethnic group, would not let him in. The Lezgins have a claim on the UFNS under an informal delineation of powers in the multi-ethnic republic.
Only on February 6 was Radchenko able to make his way into the UFNS headquarters in Makhachkala. He did not stay long, however. Two gunmen broke in, threatened him with guns, grabbed him, and threw him into a car. The kidnappers told Radchenko that they would kill him if he did not leave Dagestan and then just dumped him in the downtown area. Radchenko left the republic.
Radchenko's lawyer, Murad Karikhmanov, quoted his client as saying that it was his UFNS deputy Gadzhimurat Aliev, a son of Dagestan President Mukhu Aliev, who led the opposition to block Moscow's appointee from assuming office. Moscow had to swallow this bitter pill to avoid provoking more confrontations in restive Dagestan.
Meanwhile, on February 11 the Moscow-based daily Moskovskiy Komsomolets (MK) published a story titled "Diamond Luster: Who Is Tearing Sakha out of Russia?" The Republic of Sakha-Yakutia has 90 percent of all of Russia's diamonds and 30 percent of its natural gas reserves, oil, as well as other riches. The MK story cites numerous stories "regularly appearing on popular Yakutian [Internet] sites and calling almost directly for secession from Russia." MK frets that "American sites pick up these stories." MK accuses Afanasi Maksimov, a local millionaire-entrepreneur and a deputy of the republican legislature of launching this "Independence for Yakutia" campaign and "fanning up the enmity" toward the central government as a defense against possible criminal prosecution for his numerous misdemeanors. That might well be; but MK also refers to local dissidents who insist that the federal center "beats and humiliates Yakutia."
Increased confrontation in Yakutia is indicative of growing centrifugal tension in Russia, held dormant under Putin's heel since the late 1990s but never resolved politically or economically.
During the economic crisis of the 1990s, Russian regions walled up, either banning exports to neighbors—Krasnodarsky Krai banned selling its grain to other Russian regions-or banning imports from its neighbors—Tatarstan banned vodka imports from other Russian regions. Internal customs houses, banned by Empress Elisabeth in 1754, sprang into being again. On February 3 the Moscow-based Kommersant reported that since January 15, Tatarstan had again banned vodka imports from other Russian regions.
A key factor that could unite a country in crisis is its citizens' right to self-government and self-organization. Putin's power vertical, however, is aimed at nipping any attempts at such self-determination in the bud. On May 20, 2005, then-FSB Director Nikolai Patrushev flatly stated that NGOs working in Russia threatened the country's security. On January 10, 2006, then-President Putin signed a law that severely curtailed NGOs' activities and placed them under stringent state control.
Oleg Panfilov, a noted scholar and human rights activist, told Jamestown on February 13, "With economic ties broken and self-organization traditionally suppressed, the rotten barrel of Putin's state indeed risks falling apart, once the authoritarian hoops strain to the breaking point."
This article questions whether the Russian Federation will remain a federation for long, and whether another revolution is about to happen
A political cartoon depicting the October Revolution, showing Trotsky taking over everything.
(MH)
Works Cited
MH Woks Cited
Keller, Bill. "Writers at the Barricades: A Vigil by Slavophiles". New York Times. 31 August 1991. 14 Feb 2010. <http://www.nytimes.com/1991/08/31/world/soviet-turmoil-writers-at-the-barricades-a-vigil-by-slavophiles.html?pagewanted=1>.
Wallace, Paul. "Modernize Russia? No thanks, says Russian government party." Digital Journal. 4 Feb 2010. 14 Feb 2010. <http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/287011>.
Zarakhovich, Yuri. "Putin's "Power Vertical" Doesn't Leave Other Ties to Keep Russia Together." Eurasia Daily Monitor. 25 Feb 2009: Volume 6, Issue 37. The Jamestown Foundation. 14 Feb 2010. < http://www.jamestown.org/single/?no_cache=1&tx_ttnews% 5Btt_news%5D=34548>.